“How did you get on?”
“You mean the island?”
“No. The turtle?” His jaw loosening, he threatened to smile.
“Oh!” It had not been deliberate, but this seemed to relax them a little, so she went on. “I was on a moonlight picnic, and we were turtle-egg hunting. And we found, coming over the top of a sand dune, oh, a half-a-dozen, I would guess it was, big barnacled, sea turtles, lying there on the sand, some distance away from the water.”
Marse’s face was gleaming, a burnished galaxy of freckles. “What’d you do?”
“We raced down the slope and leaped upon their backs!”
He grinned and hugged his knee. “Did you ride ‘em into the ocean?”
“Almost. I stayed on top, with the help of”—he saw it coming and turned abruptly away—“my escort,” she said, after a pause, in obvious substitution. . . .
They swung in silence.
Then Marse, his face still averted, wagged his head several times excitedly. Nursing his knee, he began urgently to jiggle the swing. He said, in a lifted voice, “Do you know what a pick-up raft is, Mamma?”
He seemed immensely remote. Mrs. Hightower was mystified, but she knew she had lost ground. “A pick-up what?”
“Do you know what a pick-up raft is?”
“Well, no.”
“Did you ever hear the story about Mr. Pete Parkerson and the pick-up raft and Adam?”
Mrs. Hightower’s brows sharpened in an unconscious frown, but she did not see how she could recover the initiative. She smiled ambiguously on her son and said, “No, Marse, tell me about it!”
Marse laid a cheek against his knee and gave himself over to the telling, with abandon. Once, starting with only seven logs—barely enough to hold them up—and a boat, Mr. Pete and Adam went down the river picking up timber (by river law “free logs”) to make out their raft, all the way to Doctortown, where they were going to sell it. As Marse retailed the adventure of each log picked up, Mrs. Hightower found herself becoming involved and wondered at the seeming awe that he gave this raffish life. On one occasion, Mr. Pete—which he pronounced Mistpete: one word, as Adam did—had pretended some logs (seven of them) were his, having, of course, never seen them before, with the adverse claimants at the other end of them, with a rifle in their boat, and had bluffed them down. Eventually, Adam and Mr. Pete reached Doctortown with the largest pick-up raft ever to be scaled there.
Lucy Hightower, as she listened in forebearance, began to sense—in a world she knew to be muddy, smelly, raw, always too cold or too hot, mosquito-bitten, sallow-faced, shifty-eyed, tight-lipped and loud-mouthed—to sense, almost below awareness and quite without sympathy, that, in his telling, it had a grace of its own. Less rudimentary and repressed were the fears in her that this gave rise to.
“Then, after their getting there with the biggest pick-up raft in history,” Marse added, in epilogue, “and getting a lot of money for it, Mr. Pete gambled the whole thing away, Adam said. Adam’s part, too, in a poker game, in a goodtime house. And Adam, between trips up the railroad embankment to see how late the train would be, telling him, every time he came back to him for more money (he had made Adam the money man) that he was going to lose it all, if he didn’t quit. And he lost every penny. And then, after losing all they had, forged a check on his cousin here in Riverton, Dock Parkerson. And had to run away to Texas.” Marse shook his head with resignation, but with a reminiscent glow on his face.
The tale had given Mrs. Hightower, not a glow, but a chill. How could she temporize over their situation in this place? Marse’s chief counselor and confessor, an illiterate, crude, barbarous negro! Even though he was honest and an extraordinary man. How could she?
“But you know,” Marse said, still absorbed, “Mr. Pete liked Adam. And Adam liked Mr. Pete. Said he was accommodating with everybody, and open-handed and, if you were his friend, he would go to the bridge with you. He wrote Adam from Texas, sending him back his part in the raft and telling him that he would send him the money for his fare out there, if he would come to Texas!”
Mrs. Hightower’s dry smile showed that her forebearance had worn thin.
“And you know what Adam did?” said Marse, his fervor unabated by this. “He took the money and went to Dock Parkerson and paid off that bad check and the court costs. Then he got a letter written to Mr. Pete, telling him to come on back here, it would be alright now, that he’d better come, he had overworked his luck too long; he had better come back and marry and settle down. Adam told him that the law of averages operated in Texas just like it did in Georgia. And he was playing a losing game. But Mr. Pete wouldn’t come back. The next year, playing poker with some Texas gamblers, he got killed.”
Mrs. Hightower felt tired by her son’s enthusiasm and the tale. A river rogue and gambler, his hero! She wondered how he was fitting this into the admonitions of the revival. She tried to give her voice a tone of soft irony, as she said, “And do you find Mr. Pete’s example inspiring?”
“Oh, he was game, but he didn’t know when to quit,” Marse said matter-of-factly. He tilted back on the seat, his head resting on her forearm momentarily. “But Adam sure can tell a tale!. . . He can even make his stuttering count.” Marse looked out into the dusk with a start. “Gee!” he jumped to his feet. “I’d better run on to the post office right now, to get that letter registered!”
“Oh, you don’t need to go yet!” Mrs. Hightower urged, clutching at the chain. “The parlor clock just struck the third quarter.”
He leaped down the steps at a bound. “But I’ve got to get back in time to eat supper and get to church early,” he cried over his shoulder, as he ran across the lawn toward the fence corner.
Gripping the iron links harshly, Mrs. Hightower put the other hand to her tightening throat. He’s not going to grow up in this insufferable place! She told herself fiercely, she told herself in the knowledge that the letter he bore to the post office proposed to the Yankee buyer a bargain price of their total land holdings.
There was a rhythmic sweep of palmetto fans. They moved to the swell of voices raised in song:
“Would you be free from your burden of sin?
There’s pow’r in the Blood, pow’r in the Blood!”
The sense of this sound and motion was disquieting to Lucy Hightower, seated between her two daughters, near the center of the main auditorium of the crowded church. Her feeling did not come of the meaning the familiar words held for her. Nor even, in itself, from the emotion of the revival-goers, which had been building up for ten days and which she knew would be extravagantly demonstrative during the evening. This, also, was too long familiar to upset her. Yet she felt a strange jeopardy in the spiritual seething about her.
Her vulnerability lay beyond her and, she feared, beyond her control. It lay in the person of her son, seated, not with the family as usual, but on the far side, in the men’s section of pews. There had been several songs. The evangelist had read his Scripture. The service was warming up. As well as she could tell from the corner of her eye at this distance, Marse was taking it with his characteristic reserve. But Lucy was apprehensive.
At the railing to the pulpit, the preacher thrust up an arm. “Wail, O ye oaks of Bashan!” he intoned, from his Scriptural reading. He moved into his sermon, speaking in a rapid, sonorous voice that had the compactness of his own thick body and smooth, dark, muscular face. The preacher warned again, as he did in every sermon that there was no half-way stop to salvation. Lucy was sure Marse had been impressed by this point, from something he had said, And, certainly, it was true!
The preacher was telling a story. The happenings in it were familiar to her through Marse’s account. It was of the drowning of Jack Boswell, a riverboat pilot, in the Ocmulgee at Indian Point, earlier in the summer. . . At the end, the preacher said, “Boswell put all his faith in his own strength!”
Lucy, looking toward the faraway pew, thought that Marse’s face seemed paler, though she could not be sure
. It was a crisis in his life, she was certain. She could not say—she halted her fan—she would not dare say, of what magnitude. It should be of the greatest, and he was as serious as a boy could be at eleven. If only the circumstances were different—but she could not choose the circumstances!
At the railing the preacher’s smile seemed sinister. “Ah, the river!” he murmured, “Smooth and pleasing its surface. But who can guess the treacherous current below it?”
But Marse had not sought her aid—he had, it seemed, deliberately avoided the subject with her. She feared that somehow, in a way he was not even conscious of, he had been estranged from her, already. Already? What did she mean?
The preacher shouted: “Jack Boswell had never met a force so powerful before!”
Lucy underwent a sinking in the pit of her stomach. Or could it be some indefinable guilt of her own? Some irresponsibility? Disloyalty?
The darkness at the open windows flickered with lightning. The preacher stood at the chancel rail, braced with his feet apart. He raised his arms abruptly, lifting himself up on his toes, and came down with a powerful thrust. “That river is sin!” He moved off along the railing, waving his arms, shouting hoarsely.
A moment later the choir eagerly led the way into, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” And the aisles began to fill with people coming down to the railing to shake hands with the preachers—those who wanted to live a better life. As the crowd thinned out, Lucy glanced in Marse’s direction, with strangely mingled feelings. She found him immobile in his seat and, in spite of herself, she could not deny that it allayed some of the apprehension in her.
But the evening’s evangelical work went on. There were other descents to the railing by the assorted revival goers to other propositions. And still Marse remained in his seat. The evening was nearing its climax and conclusion. There were but few left in the house who had not been down on some proposition, or other. And as the choir broke into “Tell Mother I’ll Be There,” the preacher raised his voice above the singing to say, “All those who want to give their hearts to God, come down and kneel at the chancel rail!”
The time for those under conviction to seek salvation was at hand. It was the final and unconditional call, the high point of the soul-saving appeal.
The response was slower and more scattering. The preacher kept the choir going through the third and on into the fourth verse. Then Lucy heard the scuffing, padding sound of bare feet on the boards—it seemed exaggeratedly loud, a whisper magnified by a megaphone. She had to look across the wide arc of pews to be sure; though she knew she knew it already, yet she must establish it by her senses, too. There, on the far aisle, was the small, shy figure of Marcellus, moving uncertainly toward the pulpit, his body pitched a little forward by the slanting floor.
She caught her breath, laying down her fan. Hadn’t she expected it? But she experienced a sense of shock at the actuality, nevertheless. She stared until he finally knelt at the railing and the pastor of the church put an arm around his shoulders. Then, she closed her own eyes and said, “Oh God, have mercy on me! Have mercy on me and send me grace to do what I ought to do now!”
Should she go down to pray with him? Anxiety drew Lucy’s face into a knot. She had never been down to the railing to pray with or for anyone. She had never approved—but that was beside the point! Now the teacher of the young men’s Sunday school class was on the other side of Marse. There would be nowhere for her to kneel—or get near him. These men were experienced and much better qualified than she was, she told herself. They were trained workers.
“Lay your sins at the feet of Jesus. . .He alone can bear them.” It was the professionally modulated voice of the evangelist, moving about the kneelers, Lucy thought, like a doctor at a first aid station.
But Marse seemed to be finding it hard to do this. The time stretched out. Lucy had pulled her fan to pieces and twisted her handkerchief into a rag and had snatched Row back into her seat and straightened out her dress innumerable times, and still he was there beneath the arms of the coachers. Finally he was the only one left and still he did not lift his head. Lucy could bear this torture no longer! She put a firm hand on Row’s knee, murmuring under her breath, “Stay here!” and the other on the back of the pew in front of her and got to her feet. “God help me!” she said silently and moved toward the aisle.
But, as she gained the open aisle and turned toward the pulpit, she saw that Marse was up and on his feet. The men stood up with him, their hands on his shoulders, reassuring themselves of his state. He nodded in response to their solicitations, but did not look at them, or speak. He seemed scarcely to notice them. He turned to the aisle on which she stood and started up to it. He did not utter a sound, though his lips were parted. His face was pale, but it shone from an inner light. He moved as a sleep-walker moves, up the aisle toward her, staring fixedly—she thought, at first, at her.
She moved a little way down the aisle to meet him, as people about stood watching. She saw, as he drew nearer that he was staring, not at her, but at the doorway behind her. He came abreast of her and kept moving. He strode past, as if Lucy were not there, to the open door.
She turned in time to see him, on the porch beyond the entrance, outlined by lightning. The thunder was deafening. Everybody knew that the church had been hit.
20.
“MARRIAGE IS FOR THE LIVING, not the dead,” Mrs. Hightower said.
“Yessum,” Adam answered noncommittally, his stuttering taut. “Hit hard to say some time whut hit’s for!”
“That is the wrong attitude, Adam!”
She stood with him at the back steps, all in white—shirtwaist and skirt and shoes—though it was only eleven o’clock in the morning. She could scarcely say why now. The sunless day was sultry, the air seemed as warm and thick as soup, and faint beads of perspiration covered her upper lip. She was dressed to go with Marse to the church in the early afternoon to meet their pastor, for though Marse had been baptized as a baby, he had never been confirmed, Mr. Hightower insisting that this await Marse’s mature decision. And now seemed to be the time. She decided that her getting dressed so early must have been due to heat derangement. Already she felt the back of her shirtwaist unpleasantly damp between the shoulder blades. Yet it could have been complicated by a cross purpose that came to her in the middle of the night. She had been dreaming fantastically of the time in their early marriage when Mr. Hightower came to Aiken to fetch her back to Georgia, as if it were going on then, and she had awakened with a desperate determination not to be trapped.
She was speaking now, not of her own marriage ostensibly, but of Adam’s. She added, “You have gone already way beyond your marriage responsibilities.”
He glanced up at her, then lowered his gaze to the dimness of the hallway behind her. “H-hit hard to say where a man’s responsibilities ends in marriage,” he said, shaking his head.
Her eyes widened and darkened in bafflement and her mouth twisted impulsively, as if for retort, but she turned without speaking and walked away. Taking up the white pocketbook which lay on the tool chest against the wall, she extracted her handkerchief and dabbed her mouth and brow. She faced him again and said positively, “I believe very little in divorce. But the law recognizes insanity. And in a case like yours it is the same as death!” Arthur Adair had brought back the report from the asylum that Adam’s wife, Malinda, was now confined to a padded cell and, though it was problematic how long she might live, she would never be out again.
Adam, his voice from the depths of his chest, spoke with dry and solemn succinctness. “Hit l-like death, but hit ain’t!”
Mrs. Hightower turned around and stared at him, saying flatly, “Yes, I know. It’s worse than death!” Then she lifted her head in what seemed a gesture of defiance. “But you can’t let it drag you in after it—into a cell!” She came back toward the steps. “I think you ought to go ahead and remarry, Adam.”
He mopped his face and the back of his neck, moving alongside the entr
ance, in meditation. What was it? he asked himself. The heat? Everybody got a little flighty this kind of weather. Or was she agreeing with his ma and getting after him obliquely for not marrying Babe? “H-hit’s bin a corn crop, not marryin’ on my mind!” he said finally, with a trace of a wry smile.
“Ah, this weather!” she exclaimed, dabbing her face again.
“And the Land Deal!” He turned about, grimacing, still mopping his face. “Whut you reckon’s happened to them Yankees?”
For only the fraction of a second, Mrs. Hightower’s serious eyes brightened with something that looked like glee, then she drew in a quivering breath and sighed, “The plague-take-it, old Land Deal!”
By common impulse, they both glanced at each other diffidently. Each would allow the other the initiative in beginning. Each shook his head with an air of reluctance and misgiving.
Finally Adam, in a change of manner, said, “Marse anywhere ‘round?”
“Marse?” Mrs. Hightower blinked at the steps. “I’m afraid he’s not!” Then, her face softening, she added, “He’s gone to take the girls swimming. The girls go to the swimminghole in the mornings now. And he went along with Mr. Henry Bruce and little Walter to make another man to help pull them out, if need be.”
Mrs. Hightower had got a little involved in her explanation and Adam, nodding, said repeatedly, “’S-sall right! ‘Sall right! I just wanted to tell ‘him how sorry I am we didn’t’ git to go seining on the Fourth of July.” He smiled indulgently. “And to tell ‘im, too, that the River’s right and I got a trotline I want ‘im to help me run, one night soon.”
Mrs. Hightower’s face reflected Adam’s expression and she said, in the conventional way, “I know he’ll be delighted to go fishing out there!” Though, after she had said it, she had an uneasy moment of wondering, since the evening before, what Marse might want to do.
Adam turned away casually and said, a detectable wariness in his stance and in his voice, “Y-you know I went fishin’ on the Fourth with that crazy nigger, Kiger Steele?”
This is Adam (Lightwood History Collection Book 4) Page 23
